No Pressure Preschool Academics
Teaching academics to preschoolers periodically gets attacked by people who think children are better off learning values or traditional preschool topics. Why does it have to be one or the other? A child learning at home has all day and can learn academics, values, and traditional preschool topics like fireman themes and still have lots of free time to play.
The argument against academics at a young age is based on the assumption that no one would ever voluntarily learn to read, write, or do math. In other words, it’s an assumption that academics are so horrible that it’s child abuse to teach them to preschoolers.
Anyone who has spent time with children should know without being told that isn’t true. Children love to learn. Their minds are unendingly curious. They want to know everything. Most preschoolers long to learn to read.
Academics don't have to be boring
This doesn’t mean a child should be chained to a desk and forced to read or do math against his will. There is no better way to insure a child will grow up hating learning. Public school, if a child goes there, often takes away the joy of learning by turning it into a must-do, high pressure, standardized-test controlled, graded experience. However, there is no reason to start that in the preschool years. Preschool is for learning what the child wants to learn, beyond the essentials of preschool life.
Every preschooler needs to be learning something. It might be reading and math, or it might be figuring out how to make a toy dinosaur come to life, but something must be going on in the child’s brain. Each child will have different interests, and if a parent is pursuing that interest, it’s unlikely the child will be harmed by actually learning something in the years his mind is most anxious to learn.
The trick is to let the child have some control. Certainly we can encourage and guide, but we don’t need to force learning. My children had fifteen minutes a day of reading lessons and fifteen of math—if they wanted it. Since most children their age spent that long in front of a television, I couldn’t see how it could hurt. They all wanted it, but not every day, so we didn't do it every day.
Reading
Reading doesn’t have to be the way you remember it in school. Our reading lessons were done by curling up in a comfy chair together, and by playing games. Children who liked worksheets (some do) got them. The rest just read in my lap. It was cozy, it was attention from Mom, and it was peaceful. This is the reason my children could read despite having been in public school during the infamous Whole Language experiment that doomed millions of children to non-reader status. It's the reason they loved reading.
(Article continues below this book suggestion.)
Math
Who says math has to be a worksheet if a child hates worksheets? You can do math in real life by cooking, playing with toy cars, or building with blocks. If your child has six little cars and two drive away (which he will be doing noisily and happily) how many are left over? If you buy a new toybox, will it fit in the space your child chose for it? Measure and find out. It’s math, and it’s not at a desk. You’ll be surprised how much math can be done without ever picking up a pencil.
I’ve known many children who’ve done non-academic preschools like Joy School and gained a great deal from it. I’ve never thought, though, that doing Joy School or something similar should keep a child from learning a little academia, too. After all, if you’ve just had a lesson on service, can’t you follow up with a few hours in the kitchen baking cookies to take to someone? Cookie baking is just bursting with academics if done properly.
To me, joy is also about doing what you love. If your child loves books, teaching him to read is a joyful gift. Just follow his lead and see if he’s interested.
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Preschool and Kindergarten at Home
